Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Hopefully, this one will go to the Supreme Court and get overturned, but I am not optimistic. There aren't a lot of Justices who actually believe in the Constitution, and what our Founding Father intended, still on the Supreme Court. I believe the idea of the government tracking their locations at all times without a warrant would have outraged the people who wrote the Constitution.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta reversed itself in a ruling Tuesday,
saying that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in
their historical cellphone location records and so the government needs
no warrant to obtain them.
The ruling was issued by the full 11-judge court of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, overturning an opinion last year by a three-judge panel.
The
case arises out of the 2012 conviction of Quartavious Davis for a
string of robberies in the Miami area. He appealed his conviction, in
part, on grounds that the cellphone tower records used to place him near
the crime scenes were obtained on a court order and should have
required a warrant.
Federal investigators obtained Davis’s
records with a court order based on “specific and articulable facts”
showing “reasonable grounds” to believe that his cell tower location
records were “relevant and material” to the investigation. That is a
lesser standard than a warrant based on probable cause that the records
sought will yield evidence of the crime.
“Cell tower location records do not contain private communications of the subscriber,” the court said in its ruling.